Steve Prefontaine's High School Career

The story of Pre's high school training

This is the story of Steve Prefontaine’s high school running at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay, Oregon. I’ve been a fan of Prefontaine since my high school days. I was the kid who stenciled "Pre" on his track singlet and memorized the magazine articles touting his prowess in Track & Field News and Sports Illustrated. Later, I mourned his death in 1975 when he was killed at the age of 24 in an auto wreck. Even later I attended the world premier of Kenny Moore’s biographic film on Pre’s life, "Without Limits," at a Santa Barbara film house. Yet, for all the available background on Prefontaine’s storied life, all tales seem to begin from his college days at the University of Oregon.

I went in search of Walt McClure, Steve Prefontaine’s high school coach. Oregon’s veritable river of running that led to Pre’s high school achievements can be traced through Coach McClure to Walt’s running father. Walt McClure, Sr. was a 1500 meter U.S. Olympian at the 1912 Stockholm Games. McClure, Sr. ran under Oregon’s famed running coach, Bill Hayward, for whom the famed Hayward Field track stadium is named. McClure, Jr. was coached by Bill Bowerman, who later recruited Prefontaine to Oregon. The younger McClure ran the half-mile and mile relay for the University of Oregon in the 1940s, with a break for WWII military service. After college graduation, Walt began a 21-year teaching and coaching career at Marshfield High School in Coos Bay. He coached track and field, cross country, football and basketball.

The successful combination of Walt McClure and Steve Prefontaine came together rather inauspiciously one evening in 1960. McClure, now age 77, recalls: "I came home at 7 p.m. from coaching and my wife told me, ‘Your son wants to attend a Cub Scout meeting but there’s no adult supervision—so you have to go, too.’ Pre’s mother, Elfriede, was a Cub Scout Den Mother and that’s where I first met him as a third grader. So I knew of him, but not really in an athletic sense until much later."

McClure’s next encounter was in 1965 when Pre, as a high school freshman, turned out for the Marshfield cross country team. As an eighth grader, Pre had run 1:45 and 3:51 for the schoolboy distances of 600 yards and 1320 yards. Clearly unspectacular times but promising enough for McClure to take note of the incoming freshman.

McClure remembers, "Steve’s choice to become a runner stems from his frustrating experience as a too-small junior high football player with few opportunities to play on game days." As a freshman Pre finished the season as the team’s number two runner and placed 53rd in the Oregon State Championship meet, but did not break five minutes for the mile in that year’s track season.

His sophomore season was similarly unspectacular, save for the district cross country meet when the diminutive Pre hung with the state mile champion and the state cross country champion for all but the last 300 yards. He followed up with a 4:31 indoor mile, but his fourth-place finish in that spring’s district track meet failed to qualify him for the high school state meet in his primary event—the two-mile.

When Pre showed up for his junior year of cross country, he was resolved to be the Oregon state champion. The end of the season found him undefeated and a record-setting state champion. From this point forward, the winter of 1968, young Pre embarked on McClure’s 30-week program, which he hoped would yield the time goals and a state championship in the two-mile. In his junior year of track Pre took aim at goals of a 9:04 two-mile, a 4:08 mile, and a 1:54 half-mile. He recorded PRs of 9:01.3 for two-miles (state record), 4:14 for the mile and 1:56.2 for the 880, and won the state meet two-mile in 9:02.7.

During the summer between his junior and senior years, Pre worked as a lifeguard, at a gas station, and as an insurance policy evaluator. McClure recounts, "His summer days were not idle. Pre ran daily distances from four to eight miles, depending on the time available and how he felt."

McClure noted that Pre displayed "a steady growth in maturity and endurance throughout late summer and the fall," capping his senior season with a second state cross country championship.

As in the previous year, at the conclusion of cross country, McClure and Pre established goals for spring track. McClure recounts that Pre’s very ambitious senior-year goals of 1:52, 3:56, and 8:40 were "not born of overconfidence; rather from a desire to explore the unknown." The half-mile goal of 1:52, if achieved, would be a state record. Moreover, the pace of 56 seconds per lap would challenge Pre in an area of weakness—his lack of pure speed.

Prefontaine’s senior-year mile goal of 3:56 was selected in the hope of approaching and possibly achieving a sub four-minute mile. Pre’s overachieving habits, as we see, began early in his running career. In his signature event, the two-mile, Pre almost reached his 8:40 goal. One has to believe his 8:41.5 national record satisfied even the loftiest of overachievers.

As track season progressed from winter to spring, McClure needed to schedule Pre’s races carefully so as to maximize his scoring potential for the team—he often ran two events in a meet—while finding meets that would lend themselves to all-out record attempts. McClure targeted the Corvallis Invitational on April 25 as Pre’s first attempt at a two-mile record.

"Corvallis was a night meet, which added an element of concern—cold weather," remembers McClure. The race was five weeks before the state meet but it represented a chance at an all-out effort for the two-mile high school record. The final individual track event was the two-mile at 9 p.m. and there were a dozen teams competing for the team title. Pre toed the start line on the cinder track with the knowledge of a record attempt kept a secret among a tight group of Marshfield coaches and athletes.

According to McClure’s recollections from almost 40 years past, Prefontaine ran alone from the gun although "one runner may have stayed with him for a couple of laps." The planned pace was 66 seconds for laps one through six, then 65 and 63 seconds for the final two laps, for a planned finish time of 8:44.

Pre started out behind schedule with a 68-second first lap, then ran 65 or 66 seconds for laps two through six. On lap seven, presumably with a big lead over the other runners, Pre picked up the pace with a 64. Then on the final lap, Pre hammered home with a 61.5-second gun lap for his record-setting 8:41.5.

McClure recalls, "Steve knew what he was trying to do and he did it. No one was yelling lap times because we’d worked on pace all winter. He did it by himself and you couldn’t ask for more than that."

Pre was undefeated in his senior year of track, winning state titles in the mile and two-mile, and running high school PRs of 1:54.3 for the half-mile and 4:06 for the mile, in addition to his national high school record two-mile performance earlier that spring.

To finish off the summer of 1969, Pre used his strength and speed from Coach McClure’s training program to run a 5,000m in 13:52.8 to place third in the U.S. vs. Europe meet at Stuttgart, Germany.

Pre was now ready for the next level of competition that lay downstream in Eugene as a member of Coach Bill Bowerman’s University of Oregon Ducks.

I asked McClure if he influenced Pre’s decision to run for Bowerman, Walt’s college coach. "Not at all. Steve asked me what I thought about college choices and I simply asked him back, ‘Well, Steve, where are the distance runners?’ "

When asked if he’d seen either of the bio pics on Pre’s life ("Without Limits" and "Prefontaine"), McClure says, "I don’t need to see them. My recollection is better than any movie will ever be."

Closing note: At the time of his death on May 30, 1975, Steve Prefontaine held every American distance record from 2,000 meters to 10,000 meters. He set his last American Record (5:01.4 for 2,000 meters) at the Marshfield High School track on May 9, 1975. That track has since been dedicated in his name: The Steve Prefontaine Track.

Building Blocks: Pre’s Training

Walt McClure used cross country as a strength builder for his challenging winter training. According to McClure, "The winter workout schedule was designed to bring the performer to his peak at the end of May without being too strenuous or monotonous for the maturity of a high school student."

McClure’s preparation for Pre’s senior year of spring track was meticulous. His charts detail Pre’s progression from November 1968 to the end of his senior year in May 1969. On one graph, "Steve Prefontaine" is hand-printed across the top, and the event "2 MILE" has a stated goal of "8:40." Then, McClure simply drew a straight line from the November Date Pace of 9:48 to the Goal Pace of 8:40 on May 30th. Pretty simple, huh? The devil, they say, is in the details.

Tom Jordan, author of the book, Pre–America’s Greatest Running Legend and the meet director of the annual Prefontaine Classic track meet at Hayward Field, believes that, "Walt McClure followed the principles of his old coach, Bill Bowerman. Walt had the knowledge that was necessary to develop a talent like Prefontaine."

McClure divided Pre’s training into three six-week cycles. Each cycle was further subdivided into three two-week blocks. In each two-week block, Pre concentrated on one of his three goal distances: half-mile, mile, or two-mile. Thus, in each six-week cycle, all three distances were given equal attention. Let’s focus on Pre’s two-mile training in November 1968 when his goal was 8:40 and current pace was 9:44.

A similar schedule was followed during the training blocks which focused on the mile and 880, using shorter, faster intervals. Pre was fed a steady diet of track intervals, three times a week for 30 weeks. Every track workout had the same warm-up: one mile jog, followed by 8 x 110 at about 16 seconds with 110 rest jogs. No interval was longer than 1320 yards. Date Pace runs were done in flats, Goal Pace runs in spikes—to simulate both race speed and conditions.

McClure had Pre run time trials or "tests" at the end of each block, in negative splits. If the Date Pace called for a 9:44 two-mile (73-second pace), Pre was asked to run laps 1-6 at 75-second pace. Then he would need to make up the 12-second deficit in the last half-mile. In Steve’s case this translated to a 70-second seventh lap and a 65-second final lap. Walt believed this type of testing had two advantages: "First, the runner is running within himself in a relaxed manner and several seconds slower than current Date Pace. Second, the runner seems to build self-confidence with the ability to accelerate the pace in later stages of the race."

By mid-April, Pre was ahead of schedule in his two-mile training. Date and Goal Paces were so close together that the Date Pace was dropped and he trained only at Goal Pace.

It’s important to note that Walt always "asked" Pre to run workouts, and never used words like "I told him to run." I sensed a mutual respect between the athlete, who respected his elder’s knowledge, and the coach, who realized his athlete’s enormous talent and capacity for work.

Walt sent me two photos of himself with Pre. In each of the photos, taken six years apart (1969 and 1975), their admiration for each other literally jumped off the page. My 14-year-old daughter, who’s grown up with Prefontaine posters in our house, was the first to notice the joy shared by Pre and his coach. "Dad, check out their eyes. Those two guys really, like, get along well together." Yeah, I guess they did.